Life Cycle Assessment of solar heating and cooling systems: the tool “ELISA”

Solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems play an important role in the achievement of energy and climate European goals. The benefits of these technologies should be evaluated taking into account their lifecycle energy and environmental impacts, calculated by applying the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The development of a complete LCA can be difficult and time-consuming particularly for no-LCA experts, discouraging them in the inclusion of the lifecycle perspective in their assessments. To overcome this limit, the paper presents “ELISA - Environmental Lifecycle Impacts of Solar Air-conditioning systems”, a user-friendly simplified tool for estimating the lifecycle energy and environmental benefits/impacts of solar technologies in different geographic contexts compared to conventional plants. ELISA can be used by researchers, designers and decision-makers to introduce the lifecycle thinking approach in the design phase of SHC systems, taking into account environmentally sound considerations in the field of the solar systems.